The Stuff Wing-Nut Dreams Are Made Of

Anyone remember how those questioning the last Republican administration about anything were called seditious traitors? Funny how now, anything up to actionable threats against the Chief Executive are considered patriotic. Hmmm.

A thought experiment: with about one gun for every adult in the U.S., consider the country a 1-molar solution of guns. What happens if you pump even more guns into that solution? Could we consider mass shootings a precipitate, with guns nucleated around the types that shouldn’t own guns and falling out of solution?

In light of a New York ban on assault rifles, Oklahoma state Rep. Dan Kirby said today he would like to invite Remington to consider Oklahoma as a gun manufacturing location. If I were a gun maker I’d sure give Oklahoma serious thought: it’d be a match made in heaven.

Responding to President Obama’s plan to issue 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention, radical lawmakers in a number of states have re-upped their efforts to exempt their state from federal gun laws by introducing “nullification” laws at the state level. A lot of Tethers and gun-crazies are applauding these bold blows for FREEDOM!!… which is rather quaint, really.

The problem with the theory of ‘nullification’ is that it ignores the 200+ year history of ‘nullification’ being uniformly struck down by the courts and unceremoniously confronted by numerous presidents/the FedGov/’tools of ZOG’ & etc. Nullification proponents reject the established Constitutional tenets that federal laws are supreme over state laws (that whole Supremacy Clause thing) and that it is Supreme Court judges (rather than lowly state legislators) that get to determine whether laws are valid or not (that Marbury v. Madison thing).

For example: in 1828, Sen. John Calhoun believed his home state of South Carolina had the right to “nullify”—declare void—the federal tariff legislation of 1828 and the right to nullify any federal laws that went against the interests of the state. Calhoun and other South Carolinians assumed they had a champion in President Andrew Jackson, a staunch defender of states’ rights and supporter of a small and limited federal government. They couldn’t have been more mistaken.

A few days later a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted conveyed to his friends back in the state. Jackson replied:

Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.

Only after Congress had authorized Jackson to subjugate South Carolina by force (and a series of compromises had been worked out) did the South Carolina Convention meet in 1833 and rescind its nullification ordinance. Too bad they didn’t think this way in 1861, eh?

Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy—none of them blinked when the time came to defend the Constitution. When you are so close to the bottom of ‘the options barrel’ that you choose nullification as your strategy, well it’s time to either actually understand history, change your strategy or choose some other country to live in, really.

All this nullification talk is pablum aimed at energizing a delusional political “base” (like ballot initiatives specifically banning Sharia o a state bill to outlaw the use of human fetuses in food products)that is more adapted to the stage of the Jerry Springer Show than to understanding 225 years of constitutional precedent.